There are two issues here that are of equal importance: First, every single digital device is susceptible to some form of malware or unauthorized access; there is no such thing as a one-hundred percent safe digital device. That being said, some are more susceptible than others. Second, I don’t feel that Samsung deleting the tweet that recommended users scan their QLED TVs indicates anything nefarious; adding another confusing and complex acronym like QLED, which is an incomplete acronym anyway as the ‘Q’ stands for ‘Quantum Dot,’ is much more concerning. While it isn’t the focus of this post, I should add that Quantum Dot technology itself is pretty nifty, as it ostensibly eliminates the need for a backlight and is one step away from the capabilities of OLED, or Organic Light-Emitting Diode, which is one of my favorite technologies when properly applied. You want a paper-thin TV with an image so clear you will fall to your knees and weep? OLED is the way to go; it actually eliminates the backlight since the pixels themselves emit their own light.

That’s an 8K(!) QLED in the header image, but also please remember that if your source video wasn’t filmed in 4K or 8K, it won’t magically appear beautiful on such a TV.

Anyway, back on topic: Samsung claims the reason behind the tweet was simply to inform customers that the option is there and they may want to do the scan once in a while, and I think that’s good advice; I applaud them for that. They later claimed it was deleted because although it was just an advisory tweet, it may raise unnecessary alarms in their customers so they had second thoughts. In a sensationalist world, that also makes sense to me.

The fact is, there is very little malware out there that affects TVs, and those who create destructive software want it to have the biggest impact possible, so writing malware for TVs, even with the installed base Samsung enjoys, isn’t a productive use of the cybercriminal’s time. Additionally, because the TVs run on Samsung’s pseudo-proprietary, lightweight and mostly open-source TizenOS, which is also used in some of its other devices such as smart watches, to provide updatable built-in protection would be trivial.

On top of that, it takes SIXTEEN button presses on a remote to get to the actual malware scan function on a Samsung TV, and the belief is very few people would go through that trouble. They don’t even do that on their PCs when it’s just a few clicks away! That’s anecdotal, by the way: Strangely, I couldn’t find any statistics on how often people actually scan, but if informal surveys in some of my classes are any indication, they don’t do it a whole lot.

But who knows? Maybe TV attacks will become the new undiscovered country for malware authors. Frankly, it doesn’t hurt to scan occasionally, and updating the OS should be standard practice. In Samsung’s case, the best course of action would be to push updates to the TVs on their own, and have them update automatically. If you’d like practical advice and information on security from all aspects, from current federal alerts to info about how to protect your PC and other devices at home, the Computer and Infrastructure Security Administration’s website has tons of it, and putting security into practice is a good idea.

Be safe.